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Sometimes when I’m searching for a particular product or service, the most frustrating thing is the way Google brings up mostly things to purchase. For example, recently I knew that a direct flight between Sydney and New York used to exist, and wanted to find out some information about it.

Search Sydney to New York JFK Flights. Search More Options Below (searches may not include deals above). Sydney to New York JFK Air Travel …www.airfaresflights.com.au/flights/Sydney/New_York-JFK/ – 50k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

Flight from New+york to Sydney from 453 euros. Search every airline including low cost. … Return One way Direct flights only Main airports only …www.edreams.com/flights/new+york–sydney/ – 21k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

To cut through this I like to use Google Blog Search, where I can usually find some helpful blogger who is talking about the concept I’m interested in. However sometimes, like this occasion where I’m essentially searching for old news, Google Blog Search fails to remove the cruft, as it tends to give an inordinate amount of weight to more recent posts:

5 hours ago by chrisy58 New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/business/07markets.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin. October 6, 2008. The selling on Wall Street began at the opening bell on Monday and only intensified as the morning went on. …Chrisy58’s Weblog – http://chrisy58.wordpress.com/

As such, one of my most often used Google sites is Google Groups — its long-term archiving and generally high quality results combined with a more traditional Google search algorithm mean I can usually find very specific discussions I’m looking for. For example, in the past I’ve used it for finding out people’s experience with getting a green card, sourcing older tech support, or travel experiences. Lately though, Google Groups has been completely broken. Here are the results for my search:

I’ve been noticing how useless Groups has been for several months now and assumed Google would do the usual thing and fix it up pretty fast. I just checked and the last mention of Groups on the official Google blog was in January 2007 when this feature was taken out of beta, meaning it’s a problem wasn’t fixed in the 18 months it was in beta.

I heard one of the reasons why PicasaWeb limits a user’s space (as opposed to Flickr’s unlimited paid service, a sore point I won’t discuss now) is to “prevent spam” — if they can choose to fundamentally cripple a product in their fight against spam, why not fix one that is broken by spam?

One of the great things about Australia is we have a very strong department in the government called the ACCC. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission does a great job of keeping things fair in Australia between businesses and consumers. While this can be seen as hampering free trade and an open market, they actually do a great job of keeping a “treat people fairly” mentality prevalent, and in practice there is great competition in Australia.

The ACCC help support other branches of government such as the Australian Communications and Media Authority with things like the 2003 Spam Act. As per the ACCC, “Under the Spam Act it is illegal to send, or cause to be sent, ‘unsolicited commercial electronic messages’ that have an Australian link.”

What this means is even if you have a prior business relationship, if you haven’t explicitly stated “send me emails about stuff”, businesses are in breach of the act if they send you anything to do with a commercial site at all.

Since moving to the US I’ve noticed that on almost every site I use, if I give my email address I can expect to start receiving a decent amount of crap from that company. For a lot of businesses it ends up losing them income in the long run by alienating power users who would otherwise use word-of-mouth to promote that business.

Lately I’ve noticed something somewhat sinister. I’ve been trying to unsubscribe from websites and regardless of what I do, I remain on the lists. Sometimes it’s because the company obfuscates the removal process (hi Mint – by the way, thanks for sending super-confidential details via email without asking me first! Shame your site is so pretty, so I forgive you), but I’ve seen several examples of late where the unsubscribe is just plain broken.

So let me name and shame some people.

The worst two:

Lee Jeans is a shocker. Unsubscribe link that does nothing at all. I had to add them to a deletion filter, as numerous emails to members of staff did nothing to resolve this. Even mention of the Spam Act did nothing to help.

JobFox. Ahh, JobFox. I tried everything I could to unsubscribe from JobFox. I edited all my preferences, I clicked on links, I emailed the helpdesk, and then I even emailed individual members of their team. Nothing. Also added to the deletion queue.

Then there are a whole bunch of smaller sites (Hi DavinciTeam). Thankfully some startups at least listen when you write to them. I got a very impressive response from Mixx via the Director of Product Management, Will Kern:

I wanted to let you know that this has been taken care of. You will no longer receive marketing e-mails from Mixx. Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.

Me: Thanks very much – and thanks for letting me know too (and on a Saturday no less!).

Will: You are most welcome! Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, who keeps track ;-)

Very pleasant and prompt. You guys are definitely back in my good books!

Workology also had a similar bug, but again, I got a prompt, helpful response which was great.

Finally, I wish I could remember the name of the site who had an unsubscribe link to nowhere. Checking back a couple of weeks later and there was a page but with no options on it.

Update: Just remembered. Stumbleupon. I never did get a reply from your customer service team either, although thankfully the emails stopped.

All of this begs the question, why do so many companies have broken systems? Is it a deliberate thing? Is QA behind the ball? Am I just unlucky? Inquiring minds wish to know.

All I do know is it really hammers home just how underappreciated the asynchronous user experience is. Incorrect or poorly timed emails, slow-to-arrive confirmations, sensitive information, spam, and poor control of all of this can have a huge effect on the user experience of the site. While this part of design for a new application usually comes late in the process, it doesn’t mean it should be treated as an afterthought or not part of the user experience.